Nate Pritts

from DECOHERENCE
 
How can one happening
          call up both
 
previous similar occurrences
as well as the diverse flow / feelings associated?
 
                                The complex memory architecture of
 
when she said Remember me
she was asking / impossible.
 
This is what we call control
          compression of the moment / such as
 
the wasp trapped between two glass panes
          is there now & is there forever / late summer
                                            & what does it matter.
 
Each of several trees mingled / leaves
twisted & not caring which trunk they traced back to
 
          whether it was afternoon or morning.
Even right now
                          I’m breathing in the purest air
          the sweetest inspiration from the day.
 
Morning is when one side of the sky feels open
          the other crowded with sullen clouds
either growing dark or fading.
 
 
 
 
from DECOHERENCE
 
The surrounding buildings caught every type of sunlight
            & you said this was now a field
 
                        against which / we could / truly see
 
& there was such loving detail
            in the structure of the skyline
                        though my mechanical mind translated
 
this one gone moment
 
            into a construction of blunt & faded syntax
                        so that this blue sky was not raging
with rare beauty
 
            but simply was            was inexorable            unyielding.
 
            Natural elements
                        are fraught when seen in conflict / disharmony
with something not itself
 
& you told me you loved me
                                                my constituent fragments
                        unified only in the sunlight
as it faded in the brown of your hair.
 
 
 
 
from DECOHERENCE
 
            The speaker combines a sense of joy
in description of the world
with the reality of these inducements
            as filtered by / processed through
 
                        a brain of language
that often gets it wrong.

Always joy is transmuted into some other joy
            or is maybe only close to a correct impression

& so begins to stay away from moments
            of immense sensory detail
in favor of complex avoidance strategies

            too clunky recordings of inner clockwork
only because those will always be mistaken anyway.

So are we happy to lack the delicate instruments
necessary to achieve
                                or allow the impact of events?
 
 
 
 
Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sweet Nothing which Publishers Weekly describes as “both baroque and irreverent, banal and romantic, his poems […] arrive at a place of vulnerability and sincerity.” He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal & small press.
 
 
 
 
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